Stu: This week we welcome Stig Severinsen to the show.He is a Danish freediver. He is a four-time world freediving champion and holder of multiple Guinness World Records. He wrote Træk Vejret – mere energi, mindre stress (2009), published in English in 2010 as Breatheology – The Art of Conscious Breathing.

Questions we ask in this episode:

How can we improve performance with just our breath?

Why do most of us panic to breathe after 15 seconds underwater?

Can our breathing patterns improve the way we sleep?

I’ve heard you talk about being ‘relaxed in an instance’, how can we achieve this?

This week I'm excited to welcome an old friend, Stig Severinsen. Stig is a world free diving champion. He holds multiple Guinness World Records for his aquatic exploits and he's an expert, no surprise, on the art of conscious breathing. In this episode we discuss how he's mastered the art of breathing into a practice that allows us to perform better every single day both physically and mentally and how we can become relaxed in an instant, so great technique. I tried it. It works surprisingly well. He's a great guy. His world record attempt will astound you, so please dial, have a listen. Enough rambling from me. Let's get into the show.

Hey guys. This is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Stig Severinsen to the show. Good morning, Stig.

Stig

00:01:32 Good morning, sir, and thank you very much.

Stu

00:01:34 Thank you so much for joining us. I think first up before we get into the juicy questions, I would love it if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Stig

00:01:46 Well, I'm a very curious person by nature, so to speak. I always loved animals, biology. So even before you got into books and all that, I loved to study nature and catch animals and observe them. So I was kind of born to become a biologist, which I then did 20, 25 odd years later. And then I went into ... Did a PhD study in medicine and so forth, went into more scientific work. But I've always been very curious, and I loved to understand more about the connection between animals, between organs. Now of course with human beings, the organs, the brain, our inner organs, so how can we optimize our health and our performance, sports basically? And how can we use then, what is my big mission in life, breathing techniques to alter to the state of mind? For example, go into the state of flow, into the zone as it's also called. How can we be in a work flow and in a more happy place in life in general? And doing most of that from breathing connected with, of course, positive psychology and the theory of flow.